Red-Letter Day
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
September 14
also known as The Exaltation of the Holy Cross, The Triumph of the Cross, Roodmas
Holy Cross Day, kept on September 14, celebrates the Cross of Christ as the instrument of the world's redemption. Its origin is a building: the basilica complex Helena (Constantine’s pious mother) raised at Golgotha and the tomb, dedicated on September 13, 335. From the fifth century the wood of the Cross was shown to the people at Jerusalem on the day after that anniversary, and the feast has been kept ever since, East and West.
The feast’s date is drawn due to a dedication. On September 13, 335, the churches Constantine had built at Jerusalem, the Martyrium at the traditional place of Golgotha and the Anastasis over the tomb, were consecrated. Helena, Constantine’s mother, traveled to the Holy Land particularly on a mission to find the sites of the crucifixion and resurrection. Upon finding them she was to consecrate the ground and erect churches on the holy sites. Through her mission and research, what was dedicated was not a shrine to an idea but the ground itself: the place where Christians of that day reported to Helena that their Lord had been executed, and the place where they said he had risen.
Within two generations the anniversary had become one of the great festivals of the Christian year. A Western pilgrim, Egeria, who was at Jerusalem in the 380s, wrote home about it and gives us a bit of a picture of what those early pilgrimages were like. The festival ran eight days. People came "for many days before" from Mesopotamia and Syria, from Egypt and the Thebaid. There were forty or fifty bishops at a minimum. The churches were decked, she says, exactly "as at Easter and Epiphany," and a man "thinks he has committed a grievous sin if he is not present." She gives the reason she was given on the spot: the days are kept with the highest honour "because the Cross of the Lord was found on this same day."
From the fifth century onward, on the day after the dedication anniversary, the wood was brought out and shown to the people. That is the act the Western name preserves: exaltation, a lifting up, the raising of the relic so a crowd could see it. The name is itself an argument. To lift up the instrument of an execution and call it glory is to say that the shame and the glory are the same event, and John's Gospel, appointed for this day, is where the church learned to say it: "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."
The keeping spread not by decree but by popular enjoyment. Pilgrims carried it home; the Jerusalem lectionary carried it into other languages. Rome received it late, at the end of the seventh century, and no pope, council, or synod can be named as the authority that introduced it. It arrived by the force of universal custom alone at that point.
What the church did with the day afterward is various and sometimes surprising. The East ranks it among the Twelve Great Feasts and keeps it by fasting, one of only three fixed strict-fast days in the year, and substitutes for the Trisagion at the Liturgy the words "Thy Cross do we worship, O Master, and we glorify thy Resurrection." Around the year 998 an English priest, Ælfric, preached the day in the vernacular, explained the two cross-days to his people, taught them to make the sign with three fingers, and answered the obvious objection about a relic cut into so many pieces: the wood "is widely distributed, by means of frequent sections, to every land. But the spiritual token is always with God, ever incorruptible, though the tree be cut in pieces." English parishes poured money into the rood that stood over the chancel arch, and one London parish's accounts run to ninety-five pounds, eleven shillings and ninepence. In 1547 those roods came down, across London and then across England. The date survived in every Prayer Book calendar, stripped of propers, and kept its one working job: dating the autumn Ember fast and the ordinations that fall in that week.
An ancient story tells how Emperor Heraclius carried the recovered Cross back toward Jerusalem. He rode to the gate arrayed as a king, on horseback, and the stones of the gate closed into a wall against him to prevent his entry. The King of heaven, an angel tells him, came here neither arrayed as a king nor on horseback, but humbly, on a donkey. He stripped to his shirt and carried the wood barefoot. Whatever the history of that scene, the church that told it knew what its own feast meant. The Cross is not a trophy to be paraded by whoever holds it. It isn’t a talisman to guarantee victory or be wielded for worldly power or honor. It is the shape the glory took, of glory only through humility and suffering, and the day exists to say that the worst thing done in the world was made the door of life by the power of our Almighty God.
You keep this day whether or not you can decide what to think about relics. The question the feast puts to you is simpler and harder than authentication: the collect does not ask for grace to admire the Cross, but grace "to take up our cross and follow him." That is not a metaphor you get to choose the meaning of. Somewhere in your life there is a cost you would rather not carry, an obedience with a real price, a humiliation you could avoid by riding through the gate arrayed as a king. The feast says that the thing you would rather set down is exactly where the glory is hidden. What are you carrying today that you have been treating as an obstacle to your life with God, rather than as the place where he is meeting you?
This day is linked to two different commemorations that are closely related. One is the dedication of Constantine's Jerusalem churches, firmly dated to September 13, 335, and the annual showing of the wood of the Cross on the following day, which the modern Roman commentary Calendarium Romanum attests from the fifth century onward, not from 335 itself. The other is the finding of the Cross itself, traditionally by Helena, the mother of Constantine, around 326.
That second event is where the evidence thins. There is no contemporary account of it. Eusebius, who was closest to Constantine and wrote at length about the Jerusalem building programme and the discovery of the tomb, describes no finding of the Cross and gives Helena no part in one. The earliest datable references linking her to a discovery come from the 390s, some sixty to seventy years later, and the fullest narrative, in Socrates Scholasticus, was written about 439 to 443: three crosses in the sepulchre, Pilate's tablet, a dying woman healed by the touch of the third, the nails made into bridle-bits and a helmet. Sozomen, Theodoret and Rufinus tell it too, and differ from each other in the details. That the story grows in the telling is the ordinary condition of a fourth-century memory reaching us through fifth-century compilers, and it is what a candid reader should expect.
What the documents do bear is narrower and firmer, and the distinction matters. That the Jerusalem churches were dedicated in 335 is not in question. That a wood relic was venerated at Jerusalem and its fragments distributed by the middle of the fourth century rests on Cyril of Jerusalem, preaching on Golgotha itself about 350: "the whole world has since been filled with pieces of the wood of the Cross." And that the liturgy of veneration was early, elaborate and widely attended rests on Egeria.
Two further disputes exist around the day. The relic was carried off when Persian forces sacked Jerusalem in 614 and recovered under the Emperor Heraclius; the year of the recovery is genuinely contested in the scholarship, with 628, 629 and 630 all defensible. And the feast's arrival at Rome, by the end of the seventh century, has no identifiable promulgating authority: the standard reference work says the feast "sprang into existence at Rome," notes an allusion under Sergius I (687 to 701), and cautions expressly that it is inexact to attribute its introduction to that pope. A separate Western feast of the Finding on May 3, Gallican in origin, ran alongside the September feast for roughly thirteen centuries until it was suppressed in 1960 and its content folded back into this day.
The English line runs differently. Medieval England kept the feast under the name In Exaltatione Sancte Crucis, and the collect it prayed was not the Gelasian one but the older Roman prayer from St Peter's, asking that those who come to adore the life-giving Cross be loosed from the bonds of their sins. The reformed Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 dropped the day's propers entirely; from 1561 through 1662 it survives as a black-letter day with no collect, epistle or gospel, retained on the page in part because the calendar was doing civil work, marking, as Whitgift put it, the usual times of payments and the times of the courts. Its one surviving liturgical function was calendrical: the autumn Ember Days, and the ordinations kept in that week, were dated from it. The American Prayer Book of 1979 restored a collect and propers, and the ACNA Book of Common Prayer 2019 carries them forward, listing Holy Cross Day among the Holy Days traditionally called red-letter days and still anchoring one Ember set to it. The Gospel appointed, John 12:31 to 36, is again the same pericope Sarum read for almost a millennium before the Reformation.
The Eastern keeping is the fullest. The Elevation is one of the Twelve Great Feasts, and it is kept by fasting: one of only three fixed strict-fast days in the year, with the Beheading of the Forerunner and the Eve of Theophany. The cross is enthroned at the centre of the church through a one-day forefeast and an eight-day afterfeast, and at the Liturgy the Trisagion gives way to "Thy Cross do we worship, O Master, and we glorify thy Resurrection." Basil belongs to the day across the Byzantine world, planted in spring for the feast, strewn on the tray that bears the cross, distributed in sprigs after veneration, and in some houses worked into the leaven for the altar bread.
Beyond Byzantium the day migrates and changes name. Armenians keep Khachverats on the Sunday nearest September 14, processing a cross dressed with basil and going out to bless the fields. Syriac and Malankara Christians keep Sleebo on the 14th, closing the season that has run since Easter. The Ethiopian Meskel and the Coptic feast fall later by the Gregorian reckoning, on September 27 and September 27 to 29, and both frame the day as the finding rather than the lifting up; Meskel is built around the demera, a great public bonfire, and is a national holiday. In Bulgaria, Krastovden marks the customary start of the grape harvest, with next year's seed blessed in church and a pilgrimage into the Rhodopes. In England the day was Holy Rood Day in September, and one lapsed custom survives in a line from a play printed in 1662: "This day, they say, is called Holy-rood Day, / And all the youth are now a nutting gone."
Primary and reference works behind the quotations above, with locations.
Egeria, Itinerarium, chapters 48 to 49: the eight-day dedication festival at Jerusalem, its crowds, its rank and its stated rationale. Quoted here from the translation of M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe (SPCK, 1919), page 95, with "a man thinks he has committed a grievous sin if he is not present" and "the decoration of all the churches is the same as at Easter and Epiphany" from the earlier translation of J. H. Bernard (Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896). Available in full at archive.org and at digital.library.upenn.edu.
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures IV.10: "the whole world has since been filled with pieces of the wood of the Cross," delivered on Golgotha about 350, translated by Edwin Hamilton Gifford in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 7; at newadvent.org/fathers/310104.htm.
Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History I.17: the fullest surviving narrative of the finding, written about 439 to 443, translated by A. C. Zenos in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 2; at ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf202.ii.iv.xvii.html.
Ælfric, Lives of Saints XXVII, "Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis": the vernacular English sermon for this day, about 998, edited and translated by W. W. Skeat for the Early English Text Society, volume II, pages 144 to 159; at archive.org.
Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, "The Exaltation of the Holy Cross": the Heraclius humility scene at the gate, and the anti-Jewish exempla noted above. Caxton's translation, edited by F. S. Ellis, volume V, pages 125 to 133; at archive.org.
Isabel F. Hapgood, Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic (Greco-Russian) Church (1906): the Great Feast listing and the strict fast at pages xvi to xvii, the Trisagion substitution at page 86; at archive.org.
J. H. Blunt, The Annotated Book of Common Prayer (1890 edition), calendar note for September 14: "Holy Rood Day in September," the 106 English dedications, and the note that the day stands in all Prayer Book calendars; at archive.org.
Brand and Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore (1905), under "Holy-Rood Day (Sept. 14)," pages 320 to 321: the nutting couplet from Grim the Collier of Croydon (printed 1662), the St Mary at Hill rood-loft accounts, and Stow's record of the roods pulled down in 1547; at archive.org.
Calendarium Romanum (1969), Commentarius historicus, page 103: the dedication date of September 13, 335, and the showing of the wood from the fifth century.
Catholic Encyclopedia, "The True Cross" (1908): the Roman reception of the feast at the end of the seventh century, the allusion under Sergius I, and the caution against attributing its introduction to him.
The Book of Common Prayer 2019 (Anglican Church in North America): the Collect, Proper Preface and lections for Holy Cross Day, and the calendar's listing of the day among the red-letter Holy Days and as an Ember anchor.
J. Wickham Legg, ed., The Sarum Missal, edited from three early manuscripts (Oxford, 1916): the medieval English formulary "In exaltacione sancte crucis," including the collect asking that those who come to adore the life-giving Cross be loosed from the bonds of their sins.
Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the Cross that he might draw the whole world to himself: Mercifully grant that we, who glory in the mystery of our redemption, may have grace to take up our cross and follow him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Isaiah 45:21–25Psalm 98Philippians 2:5–11John 12:31–36a